Moments after legendary former Florida State coach Bobby Bowden was proclaiming on an ESPN radio show that Joe Paterno’s statue should be removed, Paterno’s son Jay was on ESPN television downplaying the damaging findings of the Louis Freeh investigation that has resulted in vitriol for his father.

In an exclusive interview with reporter Tom Rinaldi, Jay Paterno said that the exhaustive report—it included over 3.5 million pages of documents—and its conclusions represent “a small chapter in Joe’s life of 85 years.”

In his 61-year career, Paterno transformed hundreds of players, a team, a program and an institution. But the Freeh report, which was not a criminal investigation, showed Paterno in a different light—as a conspirator in an attempt to cover up the sexual assault crimes committed by Paterno’s longtime assistant, Jerry Sandusky.

“There are no facts,” Jay Paterno said of the report. “This is a new interpretation of things…Where they didn’t have facts, they came to what they called reasonable conclusions.”

His father’s sworn testimony to the grand jury “has a much a higher bar,” he said.

“In no way, shape or form Joe Paterno would have put anybody in harm’s way,” he said.

Jay said his father, who died in January at age 85, always told them not to worry about bad publicity and “do what is right.”

His father, he said, did what he knew to be right. In 2001, after he was told by former team captain Mike McQueary that Sandusky had assaulted a boy in the showers of the Penn State locker room, Paterno went to his superiors, Schultz and Curley.

It wasn’t Paterno’s job or area of expertise, Jay said, to try and find out who the victim was.

Everyone, he said, wishes they “would not have missed it,” would not have been oblivious to the heinous acts carried on around them by Sandusky. Sandusky was convicted in June on 45 counts of sex charges.